> by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one.

Yeah, but a piece of consumer electronics requiring someone to own a computer produced in the last five years (as a Firewire Mac would have been at the time) is a surprising choice, and especially so in that era. The majority of scanners and printers produced in 2001 were still parallel-port driven, because peripheral companies couldn't be sure that most people even had a computer with USB1.0 support yet. Windows XP was CD-only, but Windows 2000 still had a floppy-disk edition!

I wasn't really implying that Apple forced the spec of "a Mac with Firewire" in order to guarantee access to a CD-ROM drive; but it certainly did help, in the sense that if they had supported USB (or god forbid, parallel) from the start, and perhaps Windows from the start, then there would almost certainly have been people who bought an iPod for use on their Pentium 120 (like the one I was still personally using in 2001!), only to belatedly realize that they had no way of getting music onto their PC in order to then offload it onto the iPod.

It honestly wasn't during this period. in 2001, computers did not last as long as they do today, with performance doubling often every year to 18 months. Ask anyone who lived this period - by 2001, virtually everything had CD-ROM. If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97.

For what its worth, Microsoft Office 97 was last version to come with floppy disk release alongside the CD-ROM (46 floppies too...). That tells you a great deal about the state of CD-ROM in the late 90s. Office 2001, CD-ROM release only. There are many other examples you can point to. The PC game industry was ~100% CD-ROM or optical media in 2001 too.

You're talking about the period starting in 2001. I'm talking about the period ending in 2001. 2001 was a transition point from slow progress to the sort of performance-doubling progression you're thinking of. PCs running Windows 3.1 stuck around, doing what they do, until ~2002. People kept making games for DOS until ~2002! Then that all stopped. But someone planning a product for release in 2001, would tend to have been planning in mind of the previous era, not that new era. Except Apple, of course — as they tend to have their finger on the pulse of those sorts of changes (thus removing the floppy drive in the iMac, etc.)

> If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97.

While yes, this is true, most people didn't buy most software. I think you may have lived in a bit of a tech bubble. At the time, "retail-boxed PC software" was a thing only PC enthusiasts bought!

In that era, outside of a few coastal US cities with great Internet connectivity, most home PCs were used permanently disconnected from the Internet, with only the software that came loaded by the OEM (which is why, to this day, OEMs still feel an obligation to do that.) This is also why

> Microsoft Office 97 was last version to come with floppy disk release alongside the CD-ROM (46 floppies too...)

...because, if you look at PCs after 1996, they all had enough hard-drive space to ship with OEM-preinstalled copies of Microsoft Office. And they almost always did.

But most people of that era weren't buying new PCs. Most people of that era still only had the same PC they bought possibly nearly-a-decade prior, to be the fancy electric typewriter for their kids' book reports. Because nothing was demanding quite yet for them to upgrade. Because they weren't keeping up with new software. It was a "cycle of stagnation", per se.

It was only once Internet connectivity started improving in rural areas, and the web started developing multimedia killer apps with resource requirements that made old PCs feel slow, that the rest of the world started catching up, looking around, and wondering whether they indeed needed a new PC. (And even then, there was a lot of pushback, from a crowd who had up until that point got by with for years with the same first PC they ever bought; who was entirely unused to technology that changes out from under them. Especially when it was a teenager who wanted access to these killer apps — their parents often didn't get it. "Why do we need a new PC? The old one still works! This is like replacing a refrigerator that's still refrigerating!")

In short, this is why everything other than the iPod, in this era, was still using parallel. Consumer electronics people knew that for every one Silicon Valley technophile who has home broadband, there were 100 teen girls in Kansas with no Internet running Windows 98SE, who might nevertheless be swayed to buy an MP3 player — perhaps to then load it with music ripped from tapes using the PC's line-in jack with a program (distributed on an accompanying floppy!) that does some awful kind of low-bitrate but low-CPU-usage streaming compression.

It wasn't just that it took until 2003 for Apple to secure the IP rights necessary to launch the iTunes Music Store. It really just wouldn't have made sense in 2001. Too few people online to buy music to make sense of the licensing fees. But the adoption curve was clear (and clearly exponential); so Apple started work early, and got the deals done by 2003, when it would start being a profitable venture. Other companies, meanwhile — ones with large IP-rights-holders as partners — had tried the same thing years earlier! But those companies couldn't turn a profit. (At least outside of the few very special "even grandmas here are ahead of the rest of the world" markets of the time, like Japan.)

> Ask anyone who lived this period

To be clear, I'm probably older than you. I'm describing what I saw around me, at my house and my friends' houses and my school and my parents' offices and so forth, as someone who lived in a somewhat-rural area [town of ~50k people] from ~1995 until ~2007.

*2001 was a transition point from slow progress to the sort of performance-doubling progression you're thinking of.*

You are way off here. Lets check a contemporary source to understand the public sentiment at the time:

"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight"

Weird Al - 1999

You also are totally incorrect about internet connectivity adoption at that point.

> "My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight"

Yes, all that is true... for people who were frequently trying to do anything "interesting" with their computers. Most people didn't try to do anything interesting with their computers! Most people — your average plumber in a small town in Ohio, for example — bought a computer for "productivity" (i.e. running Word); never played a single game on it other than the ones that came with Windows; and forgot it existed basically 99% of the time. Eventually, maybe they got AOL because of the free trial CD/floppy, and checked their email once a month. (But not more often than that; they didn't want to tie up their phone line!)

For these people, buying a piece of consumer electronics like an MP3 player, that forced them to use their computer to populate it (or, indeed, to do anything other than using Word), was a confusing incursion into what had previously been an analogue affair of tape dubbing, suddenly surprising them that the machine they thought would be just fine, had suddenly "gone bad" (i.e. gone obsolete) despite having been left mostly untouched.

> You also are totally incorrect about internet connectivity adoption at that point.

You are aware that in plenty of places that theoretically had the capacity for Internet connectivity, there were still many people who didn't bother to actually get Internet access, because they had no use for it, and that (unlike today) nothing out there demanded they get online to e.g. file their taxes, right?

Or that, even for many people "with Internet", they were still essentially using a captive portal experience (like AOL) at that point, with no web browser, FTP client, or anything else that would ever lead them to try to download a piece of software or anything else 1MB or larger, right?

Also, you know there are places outside the US, right? And that consumer electronics manufacturers care very much about selling into non-US markets? Look at global Internet penetration in 2001. Think about what you'd have to do to sell a consumer electronics device to someone in India or Indonesia in 2001.

My point wasn't that any of these factors pertained to the specific technosphere bubble that Apple released — and still releases — its products into. My point was, in fact, the opposite: that Apple is distinctive among consumer electronics manufacturers for a product marketing strategy involving addressing only that technosphere bubble. Everyone else used to target the lowest common denominator — that Ohioan plumber with the "antique paperweight", or even whatever someone might be using as a computer somewhere in Nigeria or the Philippines at that time.

This output is worse than chatGPT! So many words to express so few demonstrably incorrect points.

I'm from 1987, and born in Spain. Most DOS games (mainly shareware ones from magazines) were dead by ~1998-1999. Multimedia software exploded since 1996 even for multimedia CD's in Spanish, such as encyclopedias, cooking guides, video guides, tourist VR views, Trivia games and so on. No one mentally sane would develop for DOS in 2001. Period. By 1999 everyone who was a PC user had a CD drive for it, at least to install Windows 98 and any modern game. That's it.

Floppies were only used to share small documents and maybe some split(1)/Hacha splitted software from cybercafes into some floppy stacks.

And to boot from floppy on unsupported PC's.

Bear in mind that most Pentium MMX based PC's had a CD drive. Even the ones still running in 2002 were CD based.

Internet access was arguably more equal between rural and urban areas in the late 90s, early 2000s. Few had broadband and dial up was mostly the same regardless where you were living. Most PCs had a CD-ROM drive in 2000. You didn't need good internet to go to a store to pick up a copy of StarCraft, Diablo, Half-Life, Age of Empires, Quake III etc. but you did need a CD-ROM drive and decent PC. I grew up in a rural area too. Most of my friends had games like StarCraft or Diablo too

The idea CD-ROM wasn't ubiquitous in the PC industry and consumer desktops at large in 2001 is just laughable, I'm amazed this is still being debated. Do some people just choose not to remember the explosion in the "multimedia" industry in the 90s?

If you really want to put this to bed, just look at any vintage PC magazine from 97 onwards archived on archive.org, and pay attention to the adverts, which are a literal snapshot of what people could buy at that time. Good luck finding a consumer desktop PC at any price from the Windows 98 era onwards without a CD-ROM.

In 1998, most PC magazines even had demo CD-ROMs stuck to the cover, such was the wide penetration of CD-ROM drives.

> https://archive.org/details/computermagazines

I got my first Mac in 1995 (Performa 5200CD). Obvious from its name, it had a built in CD-ROM drive.

I had the internet throughout the rest of the 90’s, dialing up via a series of external modems. 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, and eventually a 56k modem. I downloaded MP3s and played them with SoundJam MP (which Apple bought and reskinned as iTunes).

That computer was so slow (75MHz PowerPC 603) that it took nearly all of its resources to play an MP3. However, my next computer was a B&W Power Mac G3 (released in 1999) running at 400 MHz.

The difference was night and day, way more than the 5 times implied by the clock speed. Around that time I also got cable Internet (6Mbit) which was far faster than 56K dialup (yes, more than 100X faster).

By the time the iPod came out I had more music than could even fit on the 5GB hard drive. I waited till the 3rd gen and got the 40GB model.

I honestly don’t think my experience was atypical of computer enthusiasts at the time (the type of people who read Slashdot and later HN). It was only grandmas who bought a Pentium 120 in the mid 90’s and hung onto it for decades.

To be clear, my point was that consumer electronics — like the iPod — were and are typically targeted at "everyone", not "computer enthusiasts" (which would be far too few people to be worth the CapEx of hardware product development); and that, for every one computer enthusiast on Earth, there are 100 grandmas (and other similar demographics.)

(Professional electronics, on the other hand, could make all sorts of demands and assume a very specific niche audience, because they were incredibly high-margin. There used to be a big difference between professional vs consumer electronics in terms of not just what parts they used, but what connectivity standards they could assume.)

> It was only grandmas who bought a Pentium 120 in the mid 90’s and hung onto it for decades.

And, uh, you know... poor people. Blue-collar poor people, who don't care much about computing. But who would really would like to listen to some music as they take the bus to work.

As I said in my original post, Apple was doing something very exceptional within the space of consumer electronics, by selling a consumer device (not a professional device!) that actually assumed a niche market (computer enthusiasts, who had thus purchased a recent Mac) rather than being "for everyone."

The original iPod was a Mac-only device. Anyone who bought it expecting it to work on their Windows computer, whether it was brand new or Pentium 120-vintage, would've quickly discovered the incompatibility and returned it to the store. Moreover, the initial price for a first gen iPod was $399 ($672 US in 2023 money). Not something I would expect to be affordable to a person struggling along with a 6-year-old computer (Pentium 120 came out in 1995).

For a device that only played music and only worked with FireWire-equipped Macs, the original iPod was not an "everyone" device, it was a luxury product for music enthusiasts.

No, you are wrong. Since Windows 98, having a machine with a CD was mandatory to be a multimedia PC. Heck, I remember four CD game releases such as Blade Runner.

Okay? You're talking about the requirements for new computers in the era, that retail software could assume. Meanwhile, I'm talking about the requirements for consumer electronics sold into the market in the era; where, to have the widest TAM, companies would usually design connectivity around the assumption that the person purchasing the device has a very old computer.

I was there, period. If by year 2001 you didn't have a CD drive to play Unreal (1998), Deus Ex (2000) or Max Payne (2001), your PC was seriously outdated junk and no company would take your PC seriously even for office work.

In 1999, yes, maybe a 486 with Windows 95 could be barely usable, but most basic software required a Pentium with MMX because of multimedia and optimisations. That's it. We already were in the Pentium II era, not owning a K6 or Pentium MMX would outclass you in a breeze for any serious task.

AMD and VIA CPU's were really cheap and by 1999 having a machine with a Pentium MMX-like specs with a CDROM was the norm because of that.

And OFC by 1999 DOS was pretty much dead and everyone switched to Windows 95 at least.

Yes, there were people and nerds like me in 2004 totally being able to use FreeBSD/Linux under a 486 with 16MB of RAM to play downscaled MP3's, nethack and surf the web with Lynx. But for sure we weren't the target of commercial software vendors.

By the year 2001, the minimal computer specs skyrocketed for everyone since 1997.